Sometimes the past can sneak up and surprise you.Like this one Saturday night I was walking the midway trying to spot trouble before it happened, when I heard a voice call my name. She emerged from the crowd and came straight to me. I didn’t recognize her. She wore a head-scarf tied under her chin, and she was so very thin, but when she stopped in front of me, she flashed a smile, which told me who she was. “My God,” I said.

“I heard some men in town speak your name. They said you ran things here. I came to see if it was really you.”

“I can’t believe I ran into you like this,” I said.

“I live here.”

“In this town? There’s nothing around here but desert.”

“Yes. Nothing but desert. But when that’s all you’ve got, you learn to live with it.”

She reached in her purse and drew out a pack of Chesterfields. Tapping the pack against her hand, she pulled out a single cigarette.  She dropped the rest back in her purse and snapped it shut.

When I didn’t offer a light, she said, “You used to be more polite.”

“I stopped smoking ten years ago.”

She reached back in her purse, brought out a lighter and handed it to me. I cupped my hand over the flame, and she leaned into it. She blew smoke at the sky. I closed the lighter, but held it, feeling the warmth against my palm.

She turned her head, coughed once and coughed again. “Are you ill?” I asked.

“I really should quit these things.” She took a couple of more puffs. “Can’t help myself. I need my nicotine fix.”

“There are ways to stop”

“You’re concerned about my health now? That’s a laugh.”

 “Just an observation,” I said.

She tossed the butt on the ground. “Let’s take a walk. It’s more comfortable than standing while you stare at me.”

“It’s just that--I’m shocked to see you. It’s been more than twenty years.”

We began to walk up the midway. On both sides of us, game booths beckoned the rubes. The one that drew the largest crowd was the sharpshooter booth where guys tried to impress their dates by showing their marksmanship. The ping of metal on metal signaled a miss, the clang of metal falling signaled a hit.  We heard lots of pings, very few clangs. The sights of our rifles were off a hare to the left, the rifles groves made the bullets fly right.

“Did you get out of Spain before all the trouble begin?” she asked.

“I skipped over to France for a year. Then came home. And you?”

“After what happened between us, I couldn’t stay in Europe.”

We passed the baseball booth where the rubes tossed softballs at metal bowling pins. It was fixed, too. We placed weights in the balls so they never flew straight. You could have been Babe Ruth himself, and the only way you could knock those pins off the podium was pure luck.

“Can anyone win at the games?’ she asked.

“People get lucky sometimes. It can happen.”

As if to prove my point, we passed a young couple, the girl admiring a stuffed bear her boyfriend had won for her. We bought them in bulk for twenty-nine cents each, and from the look on the guy’s face, I guess he must have plunked down four or five dollars to win it.

 “When we were in Spain, you told me you wanted to be a writer,” she said. “What happened?”

I shrugged. “I wrote a book. Nobody liked it. So here I am.”

 “And you own all this,” she said.

“I’m the boss. I run the outfit, but I don’t own a thing.”

“Nothing to tie you down.”

“Not really.”

“Why should I be surprised?”

“What’s that suppose to mean?”

“You know what it means. You know exactly what it means.”

I took a deep breath, trying to control my anger. Too often my temper got the best of me, but in this case, I didn’t have a right to be angry. “All right, I suppose I know.”

“It was a simple operation, you said. And then everything would be like it was before. We could go on with our lives as if nothing had happened.”

We passed a concession stand that sold beer. We walked on. I wanted a beer badly.

“Let’s not talk about that,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about you.”

“Me? What do you want to know about me?”

“Did you marry?”

She laughed without humor. “Oh yes. A husband, a house, debts--the full catastrophe.”

“But you’re alone tonight.”

“I’m alone every night.”

“Your husband--“

“Gone. I don’t know where. I don’t care. As for our son--as soon as he was old enough, he left to begin his own life. I said goodbye and good luck. Every now and then, he comes to see me, but it’s a chore he does because it’s a obligation.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“Happy?” She reached back in her purse and drew out the Chesterfields. I still held the lighter, and this time without prompting, I lit her cigarette. “I was happy once, a long time ago. At least I thought I was. Then you said I should have the operation, and you promised that everything would be like it was before.”

“I thought it would.”

“Once you do something like that, nothing can ever be the same again. That was why I left and came home.”

“I was wrong. I admit it.”

She puffed on the cigarette, smoking it so quickly that it brought on another coughing spell. She dropped the butt and crushed it with her heel. “I should be smart enough to quit,” she said.

We were passing the tent shows now, and Bobby was on stage delivering his come-on for the freak top. She looked at the bannerlines that showed the three-legged man, the pinhead, the wolf boy, the contortionist.  “Are they really freaks?” she asked.

“They’re just people,” I said. “They may look a little different, but their lives are messed up just like everyone else’s.”

She reached out and touched my arm. “I’m tired now, and I need to go home and go to bed. Before I do, I’d like to take a ride? I’d like to ride the Ferris Wheel. Will you do that with me?”

“Sure.”

We walked back up the midway. Because I was the boss, I took her to the front of the line, and once we settled in our seat, the operator snapped the bar across our laps. We began our ascent.

“Do you ride this often,” she asked.

“Almost never.”

“I’d ride the Ferris Wheel everyday if I could.”

We reached the top, and the operator stopped the ride while he let passengers off and seated new ones. The night was warm and clear. She pointed to lights on the far horizon to the west. What’s that?” she asked.

“Los Angeles.”

“That’s sixty miles away. Oh, my, it’s so clear--and it looks so close.” She lifted her head. “And the stars--they’re so bright.”

“Up here everything looks far away and up close at the same time,” I said.

Far down at the main top, we heard a musical crescendo that signaled the end of an act. Maggie led her female elephant out the rear of the top, their performance over.

 “Look. A white Elephant.”

I shook my head. “It’s a trick of the light. It’s gray, an Indian gray.”

 “Things do look different up here, don’t they?”

“Yes, very different.”

“But the light plays tricks on you.”

“Yes. The light plays tricks.”

The Wheel began to move again, stopping to let people off and on. We reached the bottom and climbed out. We walked toward the parking lot without saying anything until we reached her car, covered in a fine layer of dust. She unlocked her door, but before she got in, she said, “Are you happy?”

“Once in a while I think I’m happy, but it doesn’t last very long.”

“Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if we if we hadn’t--“ She fell silent.

“What’s the use?” I said. “There’s no changing things. Here we are, and that’s all there is to it.”

“You were a bastard to me.” She said it in a matter-of-fact voice.

“I was.”

“Are you still a bastard?”

“If you asked some of the people who work for me, they’d say yes.”

She slid in the car and started the motor.  I thought she was about to drive off, but instead she rolled down the window. “Are you sure the elephant wasn’t white?”

 “At the time, it just looked that way,” I said.

She coughed again, and her body convulsed. Wiping her mouth, she left a dark streak across the back of her hand. She looked at me with eyes recessed so deeply I couldn’t see the pupils. “You were a bastard. That was your nature. I knew it when I hooked up with you.”

“Did you came here tonight to make me feel guilty?” I asked.

“Maybe.” She forced another smile, also humorless. “Maybe I wanted to relive old memories. Maybe I wanted to tell you a deep, dark secret. Maybe I wanted to say goodbye one last time. Maybe it was all of those things. Who the hell knows? Right now I’m too damned tired to figure it out.”

She rolled up her window and drove away, a small cloud of dust swirling in her wake.

I went back to the midway and got myself that beer. Afterward, I had another five until I felt a pleasant buzz. I still had trouble sleeping that night. When I woke the next morning and started to dress, I found her lighter in my pants pocket. I didn’t have any use for it, so I passed it along to Bobby who ran the freak top.

END